Emergency workers raced on Monday to find survivors and restore services to the French overseas territory of Mayotte, where hundreds or even thousands are feared dead from the worst cyclone to hit the Indian Ocean islands in nearly a century.
Parts of the islands, which were struck by Cyclone Chido over the weekend with winds of more than 200km/h (124m/h), remained inaccessible to rescue workers on Monday, said French civil security spokesperson Alexandre Jouassard.
“The next minutes and hours are very important,” he told France 2 TV. “We are used to working in these conditions, and a few days after, you have pockets of survivors.”
French president Emmanuel Macron was due to hold an emergency meeting about Mayotte, France’s BFMTV reported.
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The storm was the strongest to strike Mayotte in more than 90 years, French weather service Meteo France said.
Mayotte has a population of about 321,000 and is made up of two main islands over an area about twice the size of Washington DC.
The wreckage of hundreds of makeshift houses was strewn across hillsides, coconut trees had crashed through building roofs and hospital corridors were flooded, according to images from local media and the French gendarmerie.
“It was the wind, the wind blowing, and I was panicked, I screamed ‘We need help, we need help”, I was screaming because I could see the end coming for me,” John Balloz, who lives in the capital Mamoudzou, told Reuters.
“Lots of houses and even towns are wiped out, especially the slums, because for the houses made of bricks it's just the roofs.”
The full extent of casualties and damage on the island, which lies between Madagascar and Mozambique, remained unclear.
The prefect of Mayotte, Francois-Xavier Bieuville, said at the weekend that deaths would definitely be in the hundreds and possible several thousand.
Mr Jouassard said the toll would be difficult to establish quickly, especially as some people had already buried loved ones in accordance with Muslim tradition.
Images from Mayotte showed boats upended, cars buried under rubble and people cowering under tables when the cyclone hit.
Located nearly 8,000km from Paris, Mayotte is a major destination for undocumented immigrants from nearby Comoros. It is significantly poorer than the rest of France – with three in four people living below France’s national poverty rate – and has grappled with social unrest for decades.
Maritime and aerial operations were under way to transport relief supplies and equipment, French authorities said late on Sunday.
Authorities had established an air bridge between Mayotte and Réunion Island, another French overseas territory on the other side of Madagascar, said Sébastien Lecornu, the French minister of the armed forces.
Mayotte's main airport, however, remained closed to civilian flights on Monday morning, said Jean-Paul Bosland, the president of France's national firefighters' federation, and charities were struggling to respond.
Julien Bousac, a co-ordinator for medical charity Medecins du Monde, said the organisation had only managed to make contact with three of the 25 volunteers with whom it works.
Eric Coquerel, who leads the French parliament's finance committee, said the destruction in Mayotte laid bare a failure to prepare for the consequences of climate change.
“Living conditions [in Mayotte] are completely unsanitary for many,” he told French broadcaster LCI. “It was evident that ... when a cyclone hit ... we would find ourselves in a situation.”
The large undocumented population in Mayotte is especially vulnerable to natural disasters, meteorologist Gael Musquet told BFMTV. “This undocumented population evidently had difficulty accessing shelter,” he said.
Extreme weather events have become more common around the globe, in keeping with global warming. Poorer nations often say they are bearing the brunt of the environmental crisis despite historically emitting far less CO2 than richer countries.
After Mayotte, Chido made landfall in north Mozambique with winds of 260km/h and heavy rains, the United Nations Population Fund said on X. But it appears to have weakened considerably since reaching mainland Africa. – Reuters